Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
A Massive Mark
By Leah Kelleher,
a freshman at Essex High School
The wining in my head,
Buzzing as an alarm clock
Tells me,
Hold back the
Salt.
Drip,
Drip,
Down cheeks
Painted sorrows
In a blush.
Mind hammering
Away at the nail
Of my dilemma.
Turned back
Away from Anxiety’s
Pokes and prods.
The care giver
Doesn’t seem to see
Me.
But,
Every other soul
Takes a glance.
For if you sit here
Chewing your lip
To crimson,
There is no doubt you
Will be spotted.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.
